Monday, I got an email from MIT Anime club saying there were free passes to Howl’s Moving Castle on Wed night. So I replied to enter my name into the drawing to get one, and got word very late on Tuesday that my name had been chosen.<\/p>\n
So after my adventures at the doctor’s office on Wed, later that afternoon, J and I headed on down toward Cambridge to the Kendall Square Cinema. After a lengthy hike from the T stop, we arrived at the theatre to find the queue already out the door. I got our tickets and we joined it. Luckily, we didn’t have to stand out in the sun for all that long, and we were all seated in the theatre shortly after 6:30. The show began at 7pm.<\/p>\n
I’ve already commented on the movie elsewhere, and am going to see the sub later tonight, so I’m going to reserve comment on the plot for that entry, and any remarks on additional dialogue that was added — I have my suspicions about a few lines in the dub, but can’t be certain.<\/p>\n
Overall, most of the voices were pretty good. Jean Simmons as the old Sophie’s voice was absolutely wonderful — she spoke naturally, without it feeling stilted in any way, even when the line’s phrasing was awkward due to the dubbers’ moronic insistance on matching the lip movement of the character to the spoken words. I also couldn’t complain about Michael (incomprehensibly named ‘Markl’) or the Witch of the Waste. Billy Crystal as Calcifer was decent, though I felt at times like he was forcibly restraining himself. I wouldn’t have wanted to see a crazed Robin Williams-as-the-genie sort of performance, but there were points where I felt he was spot on and points where it was weak. But those performances and most of the supporting cast were quite good. Not perfect, but decent. <\/p>\n
There were still, however, some problems. The opening scene especially was terrible: the two soldiers who try and hit on Sophie were abysmal and both she and Howl turned in a poor performance there. The voice of young Sophie was not all that great throughout the film, though she did improve slightly later on. She was stiff in her speaking, unable, I suppose, to put her entire performance into her voice only. It didn’t come out sounding natural. Howl also had this problem, and it was exacerbated, I’m sure, by the fact that Christian Bale — in spite of the fact that he is Welsh, and Howl in the book is FROM WALES — did the role using an American accent. The British tend to do very flat American accents to begin with, and given that this was a voice acting part, messing around with one’s normal way of speaking when one is not a seasoned voice actor can lead to subpar results. Which this did. Howl is not a stable fellow. He’s narcissistic and prone to wild mood swings. It’s hard to convey that properly in your voice when you’re concentrating on not breaking out into the wrong pronounciation of words. I’m very very disappointed by the decision that was made to use this accent in the film; I think it damaged what could have been an excellent dub and made it only okay.<\/p>\n
Monday, I got an email from MIT Anime club saying there were free passes to Howl’s Moving Castle on Wed night. So I replied to enter my name into the drawing to get one, and got word very late on Tuesday that my name had been chosen. So after my adventures at the doctor’s office […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}